About

MA Innovation Management recognises the growing demand for creative, collaborative practitioners with an understanding of business, design and culture, whose role is not to deliver products or services but rather to identify and verify opportunity. Where MBA and design management programmes analyse problems, this postgraduate course deploys connective and creative approaches to managing innovation in order to synthesise opportunities.

About the course

MA Innovation Management is a new postgraduate course at Central Saint Martins College of Art & Design in London. It aims to bring together open-minded individuals from a diverse range of academic and professional backgrounds in order to promote new ways of thinking and doing that encourages creative collaborations in the pursuit of innovation. Our focus is on developing strategic collaborative practitioners who can identify, and develop, innovative business and public sector opportunities.

MA Innovation Management will explore innovation in relation to services, products and user experiences. It will be delivered through a range of different learning experiences, from the traditional to the experimental, from student- led to industry-linked, so that students can produce synergistic and co-operative approaches to problem-solving, risk-management and opportunity development.

Graduates of MA Innovation Management will be able to identify and deliver creativity and innovation within both a lifestyle and business context. They will be able to apply innovation tools and practices, research and identify which creative vectors are suitable for a given scenario and communicate such opportunities in a compelling and engaging way.

MA Innovation Management graduates will be highly attractive to potential employers in business, the creative industries or policy makers who wish to embrace 360- degree innovation. This postgraduate course will help graduates develop careers in areas like innovation research, strategy and business development and brand/product management.

Course Units

Unit 1: Exploration and Experimentation

Unit One acts as an induction into the College and an immersion into the area of design-driven innovation and its management.

It introduces you to critical thinking and discourses within the subject debate, utilising an interdisciplinary and collaborative team-based approach to learning as a first step to productive collaboration.

The unit supports you in establishing the necessary contextual knowledge and research skills needed to explore the subject and locate yourselves within it, whilst establishing what is, or might be possible in terms of design-driven innovation. The unit offers the opportunity to experiment, take informed risks, engage with uncertainty and learn from failure.

It opens with an Orientation Project enabling you to understand each other’s backgrounds and areas of expertise, as well as to engage with London as a research resource. The Collaborative Projects that follow give you the chance to work in groups to given briefs, testing various methodologies and methods and exploring the possibilities offered by the subject, in the development, management and communication of relevant strategic innovation opportunities.

Unit 2: Collaboration and Independence

This unit acts as a natural extension to Unit 1 and requires you to identify, propose and investigate a personal direction, in which you can demonstrate originality and self-direction in tackling and solving problems that are genuinely at the forefront of the subject.

Unit 2 lasts for 40 weeks, from term 3 in Year One until the end of the course, and builds in additional formative assessment points and opportunities for reflection.

There are three main elements to this unit: scoping and identification of a personal innovation management area to investigate; research, analysis, critique and examination of this area written in a coherent way; organisation of, and communication at, an innovation management conference/forum.

The first element gives you the opportunity to investigate the discourses of design, innovation, innovation management and business in order to locate your position within them. As this finishes you will be able to identify an area for investigation, in an individual project.

This second element gives you an extended opportunity to undertake a sustained research project. As part of the field work for this project there is a 15-week work placement, within an external host partner, or partners, to be identified, organised and managed by you. Critical reflection upon this, and other academic work that you do in parallel with this placement, enables you not only to develop your own strategic innovation opportunity, but also your own ideas about how such an opportunity can be managed; you write a dissertation articulating the findings of this research project as a whole.

Finally, you will contribute to the planning and promotion of, as well as participation in, an innovation management conference/forum. You will need to manage the relationships between the needs of each individual and those of the year group as a whole.

Ultimately, the unit is about identifying opportunities as part of a critically reflective practice, and forging and managing strategic relationships with external partners as the basis of collaborations to implement, test, communicate and manage innovation.

Careers

Innovation has been identified as crucial to business success, Cox Report. MA Innovation Management will generate career opportunities within:

Creative Industries

Innovation research

Strategy development

Business development

Brand management

Public Sector

Innovation research

Policy and strategy development

Corporate Sector

Innovation research

Strategy development

Business development

Brand management

Staff

Our staff members have active and ongoing links with a wide range of institutions, organisations and companies including The Design Council, Procter and Gamble, the Royal Society of Arts and Transport for London.